FederFARMACO Case Study

Highly regulated handling of over 60 million product units a year, inbound and outbound.

Opportunity

FederFARMACO centralises product orders and collection from more than 70 pharmaceutical laboratories in Europe, delivering supplies to the warehouses of its pharmacist cooperatives in Italy, representing two thirds of Italian pharmacies. In a sector where strict legislation has a significant impact on operational processes, FederFARMACO calls on the expertise of XPO to handle its logistics.

Solution

XPO is ensuring the management of FederFARMACO’s warehouse close to Milan. We carry out cross-docking operations there and handle on average 60 to 70 million units a year. From this site, we send drugs to the cooperatives’ 45 warehouses, which can then supply 11,400 pharmacies.

In the pharmaceutical industry, all phases of product handling – from transport to storage – are highly regulated, which has an impact on operational processes. Taking these constraints into account, the Italian XPO team reviewed the logistics process to streamline operations.

Results

As a result, the automatic sorters were replaced by manual sorting bins, in order to reduce the average transit time of packages in the warehouse. XPO reorganised the flows and optimised the shuttles’ loading, which enabled a reduction from two deliveries a week to one.

The IT system was redesigned to improve communication between the central warehouses and those of the cooperatives. The data are now directly interconnected with the warehouses of the cooperatives, which makes accessibility and traceability easier.